Christopher Hamel - Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts - Iliad - ongoing studies

[Steven Avery]

Review my PBFs

This is the 2023 book,

in 2016 was Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
Reviewed by Margaret Manion and blog by Peter Cameron

Worldcat
Tischendorf script
Tischendorf was in Cambridge for honorary LLD
Justin Sinaities points out siggy
"world that the manuscript so closely resembles the Codex Amiatinus that it can be confidently assigned to the sixth Century. It is signed
“Const. Tischendorf." The Codex Amiatinus,
COVERED AT
https://www.purebibleforum.com/inde...cripts-2016-gospel-book-of-st-augustine.3846/
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Facebook - Textus Receptus Academy

Textus Receptus Academy | Christopher de Hamel is the Gaylord Donnelley Librarian at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge | Facebook

Christopher de Hamel is the Gaylord Donnelley Librarian at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He does write some of the nicest books about manuscripts, but in that position near London...

www.facebook.com

Placed in Twitter

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1734671092600451268

Correct URL
https://x.com/StevenAveryNY/status/1759213613712056335

Then add about Simonides paying for the ms.

Then 2 posts about the Tisch theft

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Placed on blog page
https://lithub.com/is-that-a-first-...eet-one-of-historys-great-manuscript-forgers/

Post #1 - Benedict
Post #2 - does not look older .. unanswered

Unposted -
Stewart fix
Forging Antiquity

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Also email correspondence

 

[Steven Avery]

About FIVE notes from his pages that are on PBF

The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel - it does not look to modern eyes to be older
https://www.purebibleforum.com/inde...oes-not-look-to-modern-eyes-to-be-older.3622/

Do we need Worldcat ?

FOR BEFORE p. 329

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What is the source of the 1865 Maden comment on the Tischendorf visit and Sinaiticus?
Madden’s account of seeing the
Leipzig leaves of Sinaiticus in London is in his journal for that day, Bodleian, MS Eng. hist, c.178, pp. 22-3.

LIST OF AUTHENTIC MS. FOR CARM

TODESART JESU

There is a long and useful article by F. H. A. Scrivener, ‘Constantine Simonides
and His Biblical Studies’, in the guise of a review of Fac-Similes and of Tischendorfs publication of the Sinaiticus
New Testament in The Christian Remembrancer, 46, July 1863, pp. 175-208, again rehearsing and refining the stages
of the discoveries and critically assessing the accompanying claims.

I am indebted
to Ashley Cooper and Chrissy Partheni for advice on the papyri in Liverpool and for facilitating my visit.
Belief that the Mayer biblical papyri are
nevertheless genuine survived into Farrer, Literary Forgeries, p. 56, and even Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva, p. 378.

Hodgkin
For his dealings with
Simonides I used two volumes of papers in the British Library, Add. MSS 42502 A-B (some of it in Greek, which I
have not read), assembled by the antiquary John Eliot Hodgkin. His family were Quakers and looked for the good in
all people; the twentieth-century artist Howard Hodgkin was a direct descendant. The first volume includes the
deposition of Simonides (in English), fols. 359-85, which gave me several quotations here in the voice of
Simonides. His report of the Mayer hieroglyphics (this page) was published as FmoToXipaia nepi icpoy/.u<piK(ov
ypappawiv diarpifirj (A Brief Dissertation on Hieroglyphic Letters), London and Liverpool, 1860, in the form of an
epistolary essay addressed to Mayer “as a small mark of personal attachment”; citing Egyptian sources, including
his own Uranius, Simonides stubbornly explains hieroglyphs as purely symbolic, not alphabetical or phonetic, as in
the interpretations of Champollion (1822) and Lepsius (1837).

Simonides to the Bodleian Library
W. D. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, A.D. 1598-A.D. 1867, [London], 1868, pp. 280-81,
and H. H. E. Craster, History of the Bodleian Library, 1845-1945, Oxford, 1952, p. 88. Bodleian,

the translation of the letter to Coxe, cited on this page, entirely to the kindness of Dr Mae A. Goldgraben and her mother, Dr Giannoula I. Mihailidou.

The denunciation of Simonides in the Allgemeinische Zeitung of November 1853 appeared in English in The Athenaeum, no. 1478, 23 February 1856, p. 233, which I have read in British Library 1700.b.4, a volume of newspaper cuttings relating to Simonides; it was also published in French in L’Athenaeum Fnanfaise, December 1853, pp. 1185-6.

The remark of Patriarch Arthimus IV echoes the
(R. Ovenden, Burning the Books, Cambridge, Mass., 2020, p. 32).

The ‘originals’ of the letters from Kallinikos are among the Hodgson papers, BL, Add. MSS 42502B, fols. 132, 155 and
172, and were printed in English in The Literary Churchman, 16 January 1863.

TischendorPs lecture was published as Memoire sur la decouverte et I’antiquite du Codex Sinaiticus (Lu & la seance du 15
fevrier 1865), London, 1865, not mentioning the presence of the original leaves, although this was recorded by a
witness in The Journal of Sacred Literature, 7, 1865, p. 108. Cooper’s strange book The Forging of Codex Sinaiticus, cited

CARM
156; 0. Masson, ‘Le faussaire grec C. Simonides a Paris en 1854, avec deux lettres inconnues de Sainte-Beuve et un
recit du comte de Marcellus’, pp. 367-79 in Journal des Savants, 1994, including but dismissing the theory that
Simonides had faked the letter from Sainte-Beuve (this page): and D. Hernandez de la Fuente, ‘The Poet and the

 

[Steven Avery]

The various different forgeries (and probable forgeries) bought from Simonides by Phillipps at different times are listed in his catalogue under the following titles,

(l) “Panselinos ton Zwgraphcon, or Manual of Painters” (MS 13871; Sotheby’s, 4 July 1972, lot 1730; now St John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, Kacmarcik MS 21, Area Artium Collection);

(2) “Meletius’s History of Byzantine Painting” (MS 13872; Sotheby’s, 1972, as above, lot 1731; A. Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery, 400 bc-ad 2000, London, 2014, pp. 376-7, no. 1504, with plate; now the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore);

(3)-(5) “A MS. in Arrowhead Character on Vellum”, “Euleri Ethnica” and “Neocomi Historia Byzantina” (MSS 13873-5; together, Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1732);

(6) “Homeri Ilias-CARM” (MS 13877; Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1724; now Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn d543, bought from Professor Takamiya on the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection Fund, 2019);

(7) “Hesiodi Opera” (MS 13878; Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1725);

(8)-(9) “Anacreontis Carmina” and “Pythagoras Aurea Carmina” (MSS 13879-80; together, Sotheby’s, 1972, part of lot 1726; now Beinecke MS 581);

(10) “Tyrta?i Odas” (MS 13881; Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1727; now Beinecke MS 580; C. E. Lutz, ‘A Forged Manuscript in Boustrophedon’, Yale University Library Gazette, 53, 1978, pp. 28-44);

(11) “Phocylidis Carmina, &c.” (MS 13882; Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1728; now Beinecke MS 582); and

(12)-(13) “A Charter ..“Another similar Charter ..“A third Charter more suspicious than the others” (MSS 13883-85; together, Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1729; now Beinecke MS 583). Beinecke MS 251, which is genuine, is listed in B. M. W. Knox et ai, ‘The Ziskind Collection of Greek Manuscripts’, pp. 39-56 in The Yale University Library Gazette, 32, 1957, p. 51.

Phillipps’s suggestion that the scrolls might be made from boa
constrictor skin occurs in his letter to S. L. Sotheby, who printed it in his Principia Typographica, II, London, 1858, p.
136e. I am grateful to Professor Takamiya for advice on the Homer and for allowing me to see it. The visits of
Simonides to the British Museum, this page, are recounted in Madden’s journal for 22-23 February 1853. The
quotation “At first...” is Bodleian, MS Eng. hist, c.166, p. 65. Madden also wrote a recollection of the same visit in
his journal on 23 April 1856, quoted by Munby, Phillipps Studies, IV again, pp. 116-18. That is the source for the
discreet aside by Barker, traveller and orientalist (and member of a family of shipping agents in Alexandria), who
died of cholera in the Crimean War. Madden’s purchases of authentic manuscripts from Simonides are now BL,
Add. MSS 19386-93 (Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years MDCCCXLVIII-MDCCCLIll,
London, 1868, pp. 228-9); on 1 March 1853 he recorded the agreed price as £35 but in the later account
remembered it as £42. On 3 March 1853, the dealer William Boone showed Madden several Greek manuscripts
which he too had evidently bought from Simonides. The two versions of Simonides’ visit to the Bodleian Library
occur in The Athenaeum, no. 1479, 4 March 1856, included in the volume of newspaper cuttings cited above, and in
the Biographical Memoir, pp. 26-9. The encounter is also described in W. D. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library,
Oxford, A.D. 1598-A.D. 1867, [London], 1868, pp. 280-81, and H. H. E. Craster, History of the Bodleian Library, 1845-1945,
Oxford, 1952, p. 88. Bodleian, MS Barocci 33 is a collection of texts by Matthaeus Blastares, Gemistus Pletho and
others, in its original blind-stamped binding. 1 owe the translation of the letter to Coxe, cited on this page, entirely
to the kindness of Dr Mae A. Goldgraben and her mother, Dr Giannoula I. Mihailidou. The story of Simonides in
Paris is from L’Athenaeum Fnanfaise, V, 23 February 1856, pp. 156-7, supplemented by Farrer, Literary Forgeries, p.

 

[Steven Avery]

FROM THE MAIN TEXT

p. 339-375

p. 368
We now know enough about
the composition of the Gospel of Matthew to be certain that its text did
not exist in the mid-first century; and the fact that Simonides himself had

Simonides was making palimpsests of them. On the opening sheet of the
Periplus I am fairly sure I can see faint traces of other letters in Greek
still visible between lines 28 and 29 of the third column.

p. 369
According to Hodgkin, the first hint of this fantastic idea was made in
a letter written by Simonides in January i860, a few months after Tisch-
endorf s initial announcement of the find. The Literary Gazette published
gossip of this in 1861: “Should the rumour prove correct... the disclo-
sures that will follow must be of the greatest interest to archaeology.”

p. 370 - MISSING

p. 371
It is perhaps not generally known that the Leipzig portion of the
Codex Sinaiticus was in London in 1865. It was brought over by Tisch-
endorf to exhibit at a lecture he was to give in French at the Royal Society
of I.iterature. On 3 February he took it to show to Sir Frederic Madden
at the British Museum. Madden wrote, “Of course, we all looked at it
with the greatest interest. For myself, I have never for a moment doubted
its genuineness, in spite of the atrocious lies of Simonides, which will he
a great satisfaction to English biblical scholars.” In 1933 the principal

The preposterous claim that Simonides created the Codex Sinaiticus has
never quite died out. My mother’s late cousin as a little girl put her six-
pence in the collecting fund to help pay for it in 1933, hut she told me
sadly that she recalled that the manuscript was afterwards declared to be
a fake.

I actually decided to write this chapter after receiving an unsolicited email from an otherwise apparently rational American assuring me that Sinaiticus had been forged by Simonides and asking for my help in my help in proving it. I told him that such nonsense belonged with those credulous conspiracy theories such as that the moon landings of 1969 were faked, and he replied that indeed they were. He referred me to a book, which I have now read, The Forging of Codex Sinaiticus. An Illustrated Consideration of the Anomalies and the Many Indicators of 19th-century Forgery Contained in the Manuscript by Bill Cooper. The author is described as Adjunct Professor of Providential History and Apologetics at the Institute for Creation Research School of Biblical Apologetics. The gist is that Tischendorf was in a secret plot with the Vatican and the Jesuits to defraud evangelical Protestants of the received text of their English Bible and that Sinaiticus, together with the Codex Vaticanus and the Bodmer papyri and other great early biblical witnesses, are all fakes, and that Simonides had been unknowingly tricked into being an accomplice. I came down the stairs after reading this in the British Library shaking my head in despair at human nature, and I made for the Library’s Treasures Gallery. There on permanent display is one volume of the Codex Sinaiticus in an area of the exhibition called ‘Sacred Texts’, appropriately open in the Gospel of Matthew. I gazed yet again at its huge pages, ancient undulating parchment and impeccably fourth-century script. The Codex Sinaiticus was not - let me repeat, was absolutely not - forged by Constantine Simonides.


p. 372
PIC

373 - MISSING has moon landing Cooper

undulating parchment and impeccably fourth-century script. The Codex Sinaiticus
was not - let me repeat, was absolutely not - forged by Constantine Simonides.

 

[Steven Avery]

Finding the part about authentic mss at British Library